Book Review: Jungjin Lee: Echo

Book ReviewJungjin Lee: Echo Photographs by Jungjin LeeReviewed by Collier BrownExpel the clouds from the mountain, evacuate the family from the house, remove all from the room but the ceramic bowl, and what remains is what Jungjin Lee calls the "absolute echo."

Expel the clouds from the mountain, evacuate the family from the house, remove all from the room but the ceramic bowl, and what remains is what Jungjin Lee calls the “absolute echo.” Hence the title for this new monograph that spans some thirty years of Lee’s extraordinary career.

Over these three decades, critics and curators have written on the penetrating silence and distinctive voice, the tangible objectness and ephemeral nothingness, the Western zest and Eastern Zen, the serene detachments and rapt affections we sense in Lee’s work. But which is it? Something or nothing? Silent or vocal? Are we all looking at the same photographs?

Of course we are. The work, Lee explains, seeks a “harmony of opposites,” which is exactly what makes the photographs in Echoindispensable to lovers of photography no matter their preferences for fact or fiction.

Published by Spector Books as a catalog for her 2016 exhibition at Fotomuseum Winterthur, Echo surveys the themes of Lee’s previous monographs, including On Road / Ocean (2001), Desert (2002), Thing (2005), Wind (2009), and Everglades (2016).

A sense of vastness unifies what might seem thematically unrelated in this book. That oceans and deserts meet Lee’s criterion for the sublime comes as no surprise. But even the smaller, domestic “things” to which Lee refers (cups, seeds, handles, leaves) suggest an immensity disproportionate to the size of the objects themselves.

Erasure has much to do with this sleight of hand. Lee removes the props and backdrops—the whole human enterprise. And in so doing, the ocean and the ceramic bowl alike part ways from what makes them familiar. The effect is compelling and strange. The ocean floods its shores and goes on toward infinitude. The bowl, surprisingly, does the same. Instead of contracting toward a greater particularity, it expands toward the limits of the viewer’s own imagination. The photographs in this book force us to take a step back, as if we were trying to see an entire mountain range all at once.

There are many echoes here: the echo of the viewer, the echo of the photographer, and most importantly, the echo of what strikes Lee as universal. Lee traveled across South Korea and America, photographing landscapes, roads, cacti, temples, and the occasional deranged desert scrub. But place and identity have little to do with the results of Lee’s expeditions. Having studied under Robert Frank, you might think her images of the American desert, for instance, reflect a distinctly American landscape or a distinctly American view of that landscape. But the photographs in Echo could have been taken anywhere in the world. They depict all deserts at all times, all stones and trees at all times—the absolute echo.

Three essays, printed in both German and English, follow a brief introduction by Thomas Seelig, director of Fotomuseum Winterthur and curator of the Lee exhibit. The other contributors—Liz Wells, Professor of Photographic Culture at Plymouth University, Lena Fritsch, art historian and Assistant Curator at Tate Modern, and Hester Keijser, an independent curator based in The Hague—approach the work from various thematic and historical angles.

Like much of the criticism surrounding Lee’s photography, the essays in this book often diverge from one another. Stieglitz, wabi-sabi, and the poetry of Stefan George all make appearances, which, as mentioned earlier, speaks less to the value of the texts than it does the vastness each image communicates.

Of course, this being a major publication, and there being so many lyrical interpretations of Lee’s photography (essays by Vicki Goldberg, Anne Wilkes Tucker, Robert Frank, and Eugenia Parry, to name a select few), one would like to have read something more autobiographical, something from Lee herself. But we have the photographs, and at the end of the day, I’m not sure more context could do anything to explain what makes these images so unique.

The texts, set apart by beige-colored pages, appear in the middle of the book and intrude somewhat awkwardly upon the photographs. But viewed from the fore edge, they create a dark, eye-catching stripe that enhances the design. Several attractive gatefolds also add an element of surprise—an echo of the enigmas concealed.

Echo is comparatively thin, which I count among the book’s virtues. You can travel its interior in one sitting without sensory overload. I found myself anxious to start the book again before I’d even finished.

When asked why he named his book The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, the poet Chris Forhan once said, quite shrewdly, “because they’re still there.” Every new generation wakes to these mainstays of human existence. It’s where the eyes begin their primary education. But it’s not enough to take that fact for granted. Echo captures the strangeness of the familiar without, I think, insisting that we see it again as a child. Childlike wonder matters, of course. But there’s a gravity, a weight, to these images that have to do with experiences measured by geological and universal time. That’s the part we can’t erase or unlearn. Echo asks us to meet this vastness where we are right now. — Collier Brown

Collier Brown is an internationally-recognized photography critic and poet. Founder and editor of the Od Review, Brown also works as coeditor for Edition Galerie Vevais (Germany) and 21st Editions (Massachusetts). He serves regularly as juror for the International Photography Awards and Moscow International Foto Awards. Brown lives in Boston where he is currently a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University.